This may benefit from a tweak to internal APIs.

Revision::getUserText() / Revision::getRawUserText() currently pulls from the rev_user_text field (unless it got overridden by a magic coalescy thingy in the row). This means that anything pulling its own queries may be missing the original names, as it'll be stuck with rev_user_text.

If joined columns from 'user' are available when initializing the Revision object from a row, then we should use that directly; but if not, we could do an on-demand lookup via the rev_user_id if it's non-zero (local user reference), or keep the rev_user_text if it's zero (usually IP, sometimes named non-local import markers).

With that in place, the worst case scenario should be that some batch queries might be missing the join and end up doing some more row-by-row lookups (they'll probably already be doing lots of those for user/talk page existence checks, so don't worry!)... but they'll show the correct results.

Might also think about a Revision::getUserObj() or something that would hand back a fully-ready User object, rather than having to cart around (id, text) pairs all the time.

(In reply to comment #1)

If joined columns from 'user' are available when initializing the Revision
object from a row, then we should use that directly; but if not, we could do an
on-demand lookup via the rev_user_id if it's non-zero (local user reference),
or keep the rev_user_text if it's zero (usually IP, sometimes named non-local
import markers).

Note that the "magic coalescy thingy" was replaced with just checking user_name already ;)

(In reply to comment #1)

With that in place, the worst case scenario should be that some batch queries
might be missing the join and end up doing some more row-by-row lookups
(they'll probably already be doing lots of those for user/talk page existence
checks, so don't worry!)... but they'll show the correct results.

Basically done in r100475.

sumanah wrote:

Adding Yuvi to this bug since he said he'd take a look at this.

Still lots of places that need JOINs or, preferably, batch lookups.

Do we have a list of these anywhere? We need to do renames in the very near future, and this would make it much easier.

The places MediaWiki core currently actively looks at a user_text column that isn't from the user table are listed here:

• https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-Renameuser/blob/REL1_22/RenameuserSQL.php#L67-L90
• https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-Renameuser/blob/REL1_22/renameUserCleanup.php#L149-L155
• https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-Renameuser/blob/REL1_22/RenameUserJob.php#L55-L92

As of writing:

• revision . rev_user_text
• archive . ar_user_text
• logging . log_user_text
• image . img_user_text
• oldimage . oi_user_text
• filearchive . fa_user_text
• recentchanges . rc_user_text

Extensions (especially WMF used ones) need auditing for this too...

After all the changes with the actor migration and so forth (per T224348#5226167), global renames are now pretty fast, almost instant, almost 8 years after this task was created. I was wondering, should we consider this resolved now?